THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2015
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a house, her sister a house, herself two
houses." Before long, she had run out of
money. It happened frequently, he said.
"If you have a family that has been tak-
ing care of you while you were incar-
cerated, your primary objective is to take
care of them now." It was a way of feel-
ing like a person again---an adult, with
agency.
Karen Daniel, of Northwestern, told
me that money dispersed over time was
often more e ective than lump sums,
for precisely this reason. "I have seen
too many clients go through all their
money, and then there's never going to
be any more," she said. "It doesn't al-
ways happen in the expected ways. Some
people might make poor choices and
buy a fancy car. But, a lot of times, as
soon as somebody is seen by relatives
and friends as being exonerated, the rel-
atives come out of the woodwork, the
hands come out."
But the families of exonerees have
su ered, too. Jason Halstead got a job
when he was in high school to pay the
phone bills he accumulated calling his
father in prison. (Halstead received a
$2.2-million settlement from New York
State, and gave a third of it to his chil-
dren.) Richard Miles told me, "I see my
sister going through things, my brother
going through things. How can I have
something they don't?" To Miles, shar-
ing his compensation seemed like a mat-
ter of justice. "They were coming to visit
me---all those years, it was like they were
locked up, too."
Money feels, at least initially, like vin-
dication: a jury or a government would
not award millions of dollars if it didn't
acknowledge the gravity of the wrong.
"If somebody says, Let me give you 1.4
million---or eight million!---you think,
Now everybody knows that I was really,
really innocent," Austin said. "And at the
moment you have that feeling of com-
plete freedom. But how long does that
last?" Ultimately, he felt, it was much
more important to have a sense of pur-
pose. When he came home to Balti-
more, he got a job counselling troubled
kids. "So I'm cool---I got a career," he
said. "When the money came in, I just
basically invested it." After three decades
of being trapped, he also decided to have
some adventures. "I went to South Af-
rica, Jamaica. I went to Canada." He'd
always wanted to be a singer; he loved
the music scene in Durban, and sat in
with some bands there.
After Richard Miles was released
from prison, he started an organiza-
tion, Miles of Freedom, to provide ser-
vices for communities a ected by in-
carceration: a "Freedom Shuttle," for
relatives to visit loved ones in prison;
a lawn-care service to employ former
inmates. "If you don't find anything to
channel any type of nega-
tive thoughts into, you're
going to just be thinking
about it all day, every day,"
he told me. "You're just
going to be stuck in this vic-
timized state. I was already
in a victimized state for
fifteen years." Miles had
married since his release,
and his wife was pregnant
with their first child, a daughter. "I of-
tentimes say, We've all been in prison,"
he said. "We imprison ourselves in re-
lationships, in financial bankruptcy---
we lock our own selves up. The only
di erence between my prison and yours
is somebody else had the key to my
release."
The years that Austin and Miles spent
in prison seemed to have rendered them
not bitter or weakened but uncommonly
beneficent---a quality that struck me
again and again when I met exonerees.
"I haven't known one of them who hasn't
had this moment of transcendence,"
Barry Scheck, of the Innocence Project,
told me. He had a theory: the wrongly
convicted who don't attain a kind of en-
lightened surrender are simply unable
to survive. "We have lost a lot of clients
who could not get past it---just can't
cope, have been literally driven crazy,
gotten into fatal fights, committed sui-
cide." The choice for the wrongly con-
victed was stark: transcend or die.
Marge Neidecker and John Restivo
married in 2009. "I figured I
needed him, and he needed me,"
Neidecker said one afternoon, when we
were eating lunch at a tiki bar on the
riverbank near their house. A lean, mus-
cular woman with blond bangs, Neidecker
was wearing tight jeans, a black tank top,
and glasses that went darker in bright
light. When Restivo got out of prison,
she, too, was going through a di cult
time, and he was "a lifesaver," she said.
"I came home every night and he would
have fixed something, or made a great
dinner---he knows I work hard." It was
very di erent from her last relation-
ship. "I'd had enough of marriage,"
Neidecker said, grimacing. I asked her
why she'd gone back to it, and she re-
plied, emphatically, "Because I loved his
ass." After Restivo renovated her house,
they decorated the living room with sev-
eral pictures of Bob Dylan.
Lately, Restivo has been
growing pineapples in the
back yard. "They're not like
the pineapples you buy in
the store, all hard," he said.
"I let them stay on the plant
until they get soft and gold.
To say they smell good
would be an understatement."
Sometimes he volunteers to
go into the woods near the lagoon---"where
other people wouldn't dare go,"Neidecker
said---to distribute food to homeless
people who sleep there.
A few times a week, when the weather
is good, Restivo goes to the beach and
casts for snook and bluefish and tarpon.
Mostly he catches them and then lets
them go. In his living room, he'd hung
a placard that reads, "The charm of fish-
ing is that it is the pursuit of what is
elusive but attainable, and a perpetual
series of occasions for hope." "Sitting
there in the prison cell and filing mo-
tion after motion after motion, and you're
hopeful---it's kind of the same thing,"
he told me.
Restivo said that he wasn't impatient
to receive his money---"I'm used to wait-
ing"---and that he didn't fantasize about
what he would do with eighteen million
dollars. He thought about it for a mo-
ment. "I mean, listen, I would, like, you
know, bless myself with a nice boat." He
already had a name for it: Best Revenge.
Whether or not the money comes
through, Neidecker and Restivo are
looking forward to doing some travel-
ling. "John wants to go to Alaska and
go ice fishing," she said. "We both want
to go to Northern California. But rough-
ing it? No." She meant no camping out:
she wanted to travel in a Winnebago.
Neidecker's retirement from the post
o ce was not far o ; soon she would
get her pension, and they could go
whenever they wanted. She shrugged
and said, "I've done my time."